How The Seinfeld Finale Changed Larry David's Views On Television

This year marked the 25th anniversary of the first Seinfeld episode, as well as the less catchy 16th anniversary of the much-maligned final episode. It was a finale that left a large number of fans outspokenly miffed, and though many have come to realize how great it really is in retrospect, that initial backlash caused Larry David to think about his future TV ventures in a completely different light. Basically, he doesn’t want to ever do any more traditional finales.

It’s precisely this point of view that has kept him from heading into another season of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, despite the network having an open invitation for one. In his mind, there probably isn’t a big need to tie off fictional Larry David’s life with a nice little bow. Here’s how he explains his outlook on series endings with Bill Simmons for Grantland.

You know, I got so much grief from the Seinfeld finale, which a lot of people intensely disliked, that I no longer feel a need to wrap things up…It taught me a lesson, that if I ever did another show, I wasn’t gonna wrap it up.”

“Wrap it up” sounds like such a Larry phrase. David and Simmons talked about the Seinfeld finale further, with David straight-up defending it, rightfully saying it was clever having a plethora of older characters coming back to seal the doomed fate of Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer. The only way to end a “show about nothing” is by essentially doing the exact same thing it did for nine years, and I also don’t understand why people got so up in arms over it.

For anyone hoping that David might come around to Curb Your Enthusiasm in the future, he’s not 100% against it, and gives the Vegas odds of 6-to-1 that a Season 9 will exist at some point. But if it does, you can be damned sure it’ll be the same old Larry doing the same old curmudgeonly shit, and that all forms of closure will be left for other more sentimental series.

Check out part of David and Simmons’ conversation below.

Larry David spent a good part of 2014 working with Jerry Seinfeld again on the latter’s Crackle series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, as well as voicing a role on Comedy Central’s TripTank. Will we get another standalone project like Clear History from David in the coming years, or is he through with longform projects? Spend your Festivus celebrations mulling it over.